Since 1910, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has inspired curiosity and learning about the natural world and our place in it.

Anthropology

07/02/2015

One of the many cabinets we opened that day at the Museum Support Center (MSC). This one consisted of solely Peruvian pottery.

In celebration of the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, we looked deep into our anthropology collections for some amazing Peruvian objects to highlight. Here are some of our coolest finds!

As part of my research, I was able to visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center (MSC) to look at the actual objects. I met David Rosenthal, our Anthropology Collections Manager, who was kind enough to guide me through the process and give me a tour of the Anthropology Collection!

The entrance of the Museum Support Center (left). David Rosenthal, Anthropology Collections Manager with a number of Peruvian artifacts (right).

The MSC is a massive storage center, research facility, and library that holds the collections of the Smithsonian Institution! We have approximately two million objects in the archaeology collection, two hundred and fifty thousand objects in the ethnology collection, and nearly 33,000 specimens in the physical anthropology collection. You can search through our anthropology collections on our website.

This ceramic vessel originated from the Chimu culture on the North Coast of Peru. The Chimu people were an agricultural community and their pottery was often in the shape of fruits, vegetables, and other foods. This vessel features a squatting figure playing panpipes and holding a rattle. The Andes region of Peru had highly developed wind instruments, and instruments such as the panpipe held on this figurine was used to provide musical accompaniment to rituals, feasts, and warfare.

This object was one of the many collected items during the 1838-1842 United States Exploring Expedition, which formed the foundation of the Anthropology collection here at the Smithsonian Institution. The expedition was led by Lt. Charles Wilkes, and they travelled from Norfolk, Virginia, east to the islands off the coast of Portugal, around the tip of South America to Antarctica, and then up the west coast of South America. The expedition also included travels to Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific islands, the Philippines, Singapore, Hawaii, and North America's West Coast. The vessel was once exhibited here in Magnificent Voyagers,from 1985-86, which displayed a number of items from the expedition.

2: Hand woven embroidered textile

Object ID: A289614.

This textile made of cotton and wool was woven by the Paracas people of southern Peru who were very skilled embroiderers. The Andean region of Peru has a long tradition of textile production and used advanced techniques that are unknown elsewhere. They have a distinct combination of colors and design motifs.

I chose this piece because of the interesting figures, the intricate sewing details, and because it was amazing to see how the colors and details remained on the cloth for such a long time! I also thought that it was interesting how the figurine had a snake coming out of its mouth as I remember reading how the iconography of Nazca culture (which is also in southern Peru) often depicted anthromorphic characters with tongues sticking out, vomiting blood, or had hands that were ready to trap or catch. Perhaps this character sewn by the Paracas people were influenced by the Nazca culture!

Similar to the Chinese abacus, the Quipu was used by the Incas as an accounting system. The Inca Empire at its height had consisted of modern Peru, southern Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, northern Chile, and highland Argentina. Each of these strings would have a series of knots and the strings would be tied together as a bundle. After the Spanish invasion of Peru in 1532, this system began to be phased out. However, in some traditional communities today, they continue to use this 16th century accounting method!

4: Poncho

Poncho. Object ID: A387710.

This beautiful feather-embroidered poncho originated from the Chimu culture and was collected in 1913. Ponchos were often used for special ceremonies and funerary coverings. This poncho was made in the Chancay style (AD 1000-1400) which consists of geometric patterns and geometric portrayals of plants, animals, and humans.

Looking up-close at the embroidery details, the number of little feathers that were sewn on to the cloth are truly phenomenal. I couldn’t begin to imagine the amount of work and time one would have spent creating such a beautiful poncho, when I can barely sew buttons on properly!

5: Textile tools and Unku

Unku. Object ID: A133385C.

Andean weaving was highly developed and they made beautiful garments and tapestries from simple tools such as these knitting and crochet needles. They often used a combination of wool and cotton, and this shirt, or Unku, was made for everyday use, as the Andean peoples would wear clothing of higher quality for special occasions. I was drawn to this Unku because of the geometric shapes featured. We still see these patterns used in clothing today as a fashion trend, when these shapes and patterns have been used for centuries!

Since textiles were an important aspect of the Andean culture, weaving tools would even be included among the weaver’s burial offerings demonstrating the importance of this industry in the society.

I hope you enjoyed looking at some of these objects as much as I did! Join us at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Peru, Pachamama, to explore the many diverse cultures, food, songs, music, and dance that make up Peru!

Special thanks to David Rosenthal, Anthropology Collections Manager, for guiding me through the anthropology collections! Information sourced from Timelines of the Ancient World, Smithsonian Publications.

By Jessica Lam, Social Media and Public Affairs Intern, National Museum of Natural History

03/31/2015

The Museum’s Hall of Human Origins turned five on March 17! The human ancestors depicted in bronze statues throughout the hall were dressed to celebrate, with party hats and balloons. Visitors joined the celebration, wearing birthday buttons highlighting their favorite ancestors and taking selfies with lifelike head reconstructions of ancient humans.

“By asking the question, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ and taking it across the country, we are trying to open an avenue by which people can make contact with science,” said Dr. Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist and the director of the Human Origins Program.

Each stop on the exhibition tour will include public gatherings featuring conversations with scientists, civic leaders, and faith leaders about the different ways that people, cultures, and faith traditions interpret what being human means.

Dr. Briana Pobiner, a scientist and educator in the Human Origins Program, said that although evolution can be a tough topic for some people to discuss, she’s been thrilled that nearly all her interactions with visitors on the topic have been respectful and productive.

Discoveries and research are constantly improving and deepening our understanding of human evolution. A fossil jaw recently discovered in Ethiopia, for example, is the oldest ever found in the genus Homo—the group that includes modern humans. Scientists dated it at between 2.75 and 2.8 million years old, or about 400,000 years older than any previously discovered fossils.

And a project to map the Neanderthal genome was first reported in May 2010 (just two months after the Hall of Human Origins opened!). Changes like these will eventually affect the content visitors see in the exhibition—via new dates on timelines, for example, or updates to certain panels. For now, an electronic screen in one part of the exhibition provides timely updates of new findings.

Part of the beauty of the exhibition is that it’s arranged by human milestones: things like using tools and fire, living in social groups, and communicating with symbols. Even as new research provides more information about the specifics, the general organization of the hall will stand the test of time—starting with five more birthdays.

03/02/2015

My name is Briana Pobiner, and as an evolutionary anthropologist in the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, I study how our early human ancestors learned to survive and adapt to a changing world, especially through what they ate. I’m especially interested in when meat-eating became important in our evolutionary history. How did our ancestors find their food? Did they hunt or were they scavengers? How did they compete with big carnivores, who ate the same kinds of animals they did? Clues from the Earth’s fossil and archaeological records help scientists find the answers to these questions.

Fossil evidence for early humans eating meat and marrow dates back to at least 2.6 million years ago in the form of butchered animal bones. Ancient tools from this same period suggest that our ancestors used simple stone knives and rounded rocks to slice meat off of animal bones and pound them open to access the fat and calorie rich marrow inside. But at this time, early humans were barely over three feet tall and hadn’t developed hunting technology like spears or bows and arrows. So how did they take down large, dangerous animals like elephants and hippos?

To test the hypothesis that early humans could have scavenged meat and marrow from the remains of kills of carnivores, I spent several months in a modern nature preserve in central Kenya called Ol Pejeta Conservancy, following large carnivores around and watching them hunt. After waiting for predators like lions and leopards to finish consuming their prey, I found that most carcasses were abandoned with at least some meat that an early human could have scavenged. Some of the carcasses were left with a lot of meat still on the bones – especially those of the bigger prey animals. In fact, the leftover meat from just one zebra kill made by lions could have provided almost 6,100 calories for our early human ancestors – that’s the entire daily caloric requirements of almost three adult male Homo erectus individuals, or just over 11 Big Macs. Not bad for a “lowly” scavenger!

Based on these findings, waiting for larger predators to abandon their kill would have been well worth the trouble for early human species like Homo erectus, which evolved almost 1.9 million years ago and were up to 6 feet tall. They could have stuck around until after the lions were completely finished eating their prey before slicing some of that meat off of the bones and gaining access to the marrow. Plus, waiting could have reduced their risk of being eaten by the lions themselves.

Other researchers have suggested that our ancient ancestors may have scavenged from the kills of sabertoothed felids, which were around during the time that early humans started to eat more meat. Some of these extinct big cat species were even bigger than modern lions and tigers. They were likely solitary, and would have left a lot of excess meat on their prey if there was only one of them eating from the big animals that they killed.

While scientists are still trying to unravel the dietary habits of early humans, scavenging from carnivore kills seems to be one feasible method, especially in habitats with lots of big cats. For more information about this research, read my new publication in the Journal of Human Evolution.

12/23/2014

Every year a little magic happens at our Department’s holiday party. If you were around last year, you might have seen what I mean: the amazing #anthrocakes that archaeologist Eric Hollinger creates for the party every year. I think you’ll agree it’s “Tut”-ally amazing!

He’s created everything from a delicious caramel recreation of the Cliff Dwellings at Mesa Verde, to a giant chocolate Aztec calendar stone that he carved painstakingly with a nail! You can see more of his past creations here; don’t miss the chocolate terracotta army from the tomb of the first Emperor of China!

The cake is a big secret every year until the day of the party. So what did he make this year? A giant chocolate fondue volcano of Hawaiian-inspired archaeological goodness! This year's cake was inspired by the archaeological site, Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau. I've visted the site before, and I can attest to the accuracy of the sea turtles on the beach in this cake! They swim right up on the beach there, and the entire site is fascinating.

So what is so important about this site, you ask? Well, do you remember that scene from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Quasimodo yells “Sanctuary!” from the top of the church, claiming refuge for Esmeralda? In old Hawaii, if people needed a safe refuge, they’d make their way to Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau! A puuhonua was a place of refuge for anyone who had broken a law. Did I mention that the punishment for breaking a law in old Hawaii was death? Laws, or kapu, were central to Hawaiian society, and governed many different aspects of behavior. So if you’d transgressed, your only shot was to hightail it to a puuhonua, and hope you did not get caught on the way there.

You don't want to mess with these guys. Ki'i, guardians of the Kapu. Photo Credit: Eric Wienke, Flickr.

While this year's cake was not an exact recreation of an archaeological site, it drew inspiration from Hawaii's natural beauty and cultural heritage. It features a Hawaiian volcano with flowing (chocolate) lava, a waterfall, tropical flowers, palm trees, sharks, turtles, beaches and ocean, as well as elements of Hawaiian cultural sites. The cultural features included tapa cloth, tiki statues, huts, taro fields, outrigger canoe with sail, and stacked stone walls.

The volcano was inspired by Kiluawa's recent eruptions. It was about 2.5 feet high and was built around a chocolate fountain. An underlaying structure of recycled ethofoam packing blocks and cardboard were erected to form the main body of the volcano without it becoming too heavy to move.

One challenge was to redirect the flow of chocolate from the uppermost part of the fountain out onto the mountain and back again to the bottom reservoir where it could be warmed again and pumped back to the top. This was accomplished by forming aluminum foil channels to guide the flow in to paths around and back to the bottom. The foil was hidden under a coating of melted chocolate. Once finished, party-goers were able to dip fresh cut pineapple, papaya and banana into the lava as a fondue!

The mountain was covered with a total of 11 red velvet cakes which were left mostly exposed to show the surface. The outer crust of the cake, the color, and the interior spongy bubbly nature of the cake mimicked what much of the Hawaiian lava actually looks like when it has cooled.

Cake under construction. Photo Credit: Eric Hollinger.

Hawaii just wouldn't be Hawaii without flowers, so Eric took a class on flower making! The flowers are made of a specialty modeling chocolate which is cut, shaped and then painted to look like real flowers. Some of the flowers Eric made were actual violets from his yard that were coated with sugar for preservation!

Eric used many sources to assist him in crafting the cultural objects you see on the cake. Books on Hawaiian carvings and Hawaiian canoes were studied and Curator Adrienne Kaeppler advised on the project to make sure the canoe and statue were accurate.

The canoe was carved from solid chocolate and a Pocky, chocolate covered biscuit stick, was used as a mast. It was very hard to rig the distinctive Hawaiian sail since it was made of a flexible printable icing sheet, like the kind used to print photos onto a cake. The tapa were printed onto this same material. Tapa is made from Mulberry bark pounded into a cloth and dyed. Dr. Adrienne Kaeppler, Curator of Oceanic Ethnology, has a long term project on tapa cloth, which you can read about here.

The tiki statue was carved from solid chocolate using a real statue as a model. The huts were made using pretzel sticks and chocolate to form a frame and large shredded wheat biscuits were cut in half to form the thatch of the roof. Taro, a main staple of the Hawaiian diet, was featured in a wet field made of molten sugar and fondant taro plants. Palm trees were made of large pretzels and had fondant fronds attached at the top. The wall, which encloses the royal grounds at the actual archaeological site, was made of chocolate covering macadamia nuts.

Royal grounds of the cake, complete with huts and taro fields. Photo Credit: Eric Hollinger.

In the end, this amazing creation featured both the flavors and images of Hawaiian cultural and natural beauty and offered a fun and interactive addition to this year's Anthropology Holiday Party! Thanks for reading and Mele Kalikimaka to you...

08/30/2014

Since the 1960s, archaeologists have debated the origin of ancient arctic peoples and their migration paths to the New World. The North American Arctic was one of the last major regions to be settled by modern humans who crossed over from Siberia to the Arctic via the Bering Strait. This region offers a rich archaeological history documenting populations of people that relied on different kinds of stone tool technology, lived in various types of dwellings and depended on animals such as seals, walrus and caribou for survival. However, little is known about how the first arctic cultures, namely Paleo-Eskimos, Native Americans and ancestors of modern-day Inuit, travelled and interacted with one another. Where did they come from? Did they come in several waves? When did they arrive? Who are their descendants? And who can call themselves the indigenous peoples of the Arctic?

Dr. William Fitzhugh measuring a whale bone on an underwater archaeological dive in the Quebec Lower North Shore. This shot is from the Hare Harbor site on Mecatina Island in eastern Quebec, one of the southern-most Inuit settlements in the world, where Inuit whale hunters collaborated with Basque whalers in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Credit: Will Richard)

The answers to these questions have long been considered the “holy grail” of Arctic archaeology. That grail has now been discovered by an international team of scientists who analyzed 169 samples of ancient bone, hair and teeth from Arctic archaeological sites ranging from Siberia to Greenland. The results, published in the August 29 issue of Science are a stunning achievement of new DNA technology that reveal a new, separate migration of Siberian peoples into the Americas about 6,000 years ago.

The international team of scientists included lead author Maanasa Raghavan and Ekse Willerslev from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, archaeologist William Fitzhugh from the National Museum of Natural History and colleagues. Here’s what they found:

For the first time, separate origins of Arctic populations were demonstrated based on genomic as opposed to cultural data. Scientists confirmed that a distinct Paleo-Eskimo population with origins in eastern Siberia colonized and occupied the Eastern Arctic for nearly 5,000 years and was replaced by the Thule culture whale hunters (the immediate ancestors of the Inuit in Canada and Greenland) with little evidence of mixing between the two groups.Both of these groups appear to have different origins in Eastern Siberia.

Paleo-Eskimo culture and people survived many climate shifts, population displacements and diseases by relying on flexible and resilient social and economic adaptations.

Paleo-Eskimo and Thule Eskimos/Inuit in North America show no evidence of significant genetic contact with American Indians, Greenland Norse or other Europeans. Some previous DNA studies had identified American Indian genetic heritage for some Eskimo groups.

Current theories of the peopling of the Americas call for three basic migration waves into the Arctic. However, this new study reveals that there were two biologically distinct Eskimo migrations into the North American Arctic, an earlier Paleo-Eskimo wave followed by the Thule migration.

The arrows represent two waves of migration into the North American Arctic by Paleo-Eskimos and the ancestors of the Inuit in Canada and Greenland. For more information, read the paper in Science.

This study—as thorough as it is—is only an opening chapter in the genetic history of the North American Arctic. More work will be needed to parse out additional details about the gene flow of early groups in Alaska, the Eastern Arctic and Greenland to better understand the lives of these people in their Arctic world.

By Dr. William Fitzhugh, Curator of Archaeology and Director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

Editor’s note: You can learn more about the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies program by following it on Twitter, Facebook or checking out their homepage.

08/29/2014

Fieldwork is glamorous. Well, at least in the sense of discovering things first-hand; not usually in the sense of glamourous living conditions! However, paleontologists and archaeologists often make exciting discoveries in museum collections too. My name is Briana Pobiner, and I’m a prehistoric archaeologist in the Human Origins Program in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. I just returned from Kenya, studying fossils in the Paleontology Division of the Nairobi National Museum excavated from the Smithsonian-National Museums of Kenya prehistoric research site of Olorgesailie.

The Smithsonian excavations at Olorgesailie have taken place over nearly the past 3 decades, so part of what I get to do is open bags with fossils in them that have not been opened since the day the fossil was excavated in, say, 1988 – when I was 13 years old!

Needless to say, there is a lot of dust on these fossils, so I wear a lab coat to keep my clothes from getting filthy every day. Still, after a few hours, my hands are really dirty!

My main research focus is on prehistoric human diet, so I’m examining the animal fossils for evidence of human butchery in the form of marks left by stone knives. But part of the overall research at Olorgesailie is trying to understand how early human behavior – including animal butchery, plant processing, and stone toolmaking – varied over a larger landscape. To do this, the team excavated many sites in a single time horizon – in this case, that horizon is 990,000 years old. Part of reconstructing what that landscape looked like involves identifying the species of animals found in the excavations. I have been studying these fossils since 2004, and according to my Excel database, I have already studied 56,856 fossils before this year’s research commenced!

Every bone is important in these kinds of analyses. Out of the dozens of thousands of animal bones from the 990,000 year old layers of sediments at Olorgesailie, we have only identified one giraffe tooth.

Detailed view: comparing the fossil tooth to the modern giraffe tooth.

This is really interesting because most of the fossil animals from this layer are grazers (they eat grass) – like zebras, white rhinos, and certain species of antelope – implying that there was a lot of open grasslands around Olorgesailie at this time. But giraffes are browsers; they eat leaves from trees. So this single giraffe tooth tells us that there were also trees in the general vicinity of Olorgesailie. You can see Dr. Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian and of the Olorgesailie research project, and I were very happy to confirm that this tooth is indeed from a giraffe by comparing it to a modern giraffe tooth in the Osteology Division at the museum.

Images and text by Dr. Briana Pobiner, prehistoric archaeologist in the Human Origins Program, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

If you think you have it tough, consider Kennewick Man. The early American lived nearly 9,000 years ago and was likely in constant pain. He suffered from one injury after another, and his lifestyle offered little time for rest and recovery. That’s one of the numerous findings revealed in the new book,Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (Texas A&M University Press).

Edited by Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley and Richard Jantz, emeritus physical anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, the book contains 32 chapters that contextualize and analyze this iconic skeleton. The ancient bones were first discovered along the Columbia River, near Kennewick, Washington in 1996. The nearly complete skeleton offers researchers a rare case study of life in Paleoamerica.

“Kennewick Man’s bones tell his story, if you know how to read them,” says Owsley. He and his co-investigators studied every bone and tooth in meticulous detail—there are three chapters dedicated just to teeth. His smile? It was nice, until his teeth were almost worn away, “because of abrasive contaminants in the diet and use of his teeth in task-related activities,” writes John L. Hayes, author of a chapter on the skeleton’s orthodontics.

The book demonstrates how much we can learn about an individual’s environment and lifestyle from their remains. Bone biographies are inherently personal, but the scientific portrait of this ancient skeleton is surprisingly vivid. It takes us to the edge of what we can know about one Paleoamerican. Here is a sampling of the researchers’ findings:

Diet & Origin: Although his remains were found far inland, it doesn’t appear that Kennewick Man ate many of the local plants and terrestrial herbivores, like deer and elk. This is what researchers concluded from analyzing the carbon and nitrogen isotope values found in his bone collagen. The evidence suggests that he was not a longtime resident of southeastern Washington, but instead was traveling through. The scientists think Kennewick Man lived most of his life along the northern northwest coast, eating seals and fish.

A Tough Life: Kennewick Man was not a stranger to pain. At some point he fractured six ribs; developed a baseball-type injury in his right shoulder—likely from forceful and repeated spear throwing; and was hit in his right hip by a 2-inch-long projectile point. It’s difficult to imagine walking around with a stone blade embedded in your hip, but the growth of new bone around the injury shows that Kennewick Man did just that…for many years.

Cause of death: currently unknown.

The two-inch long stone blade embedded in his hip is perhaps the most dramatic feature of Kennewick Man’s skeleton. Scientists hope to discover the type of rock it’s made from to better understand the location and circumstances surrounding the injury. (Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution)

Scientific tools have advanced since researchers investigated Kennewick Man’s remains nearly a decade ago. The book closes with a vision for future research that includes ancient DNA sequencing; identification of the type of rock embedded in his hip; and measuring the isotope values of a tooth for additional clues about where he lived and what he ate as a child. While no one is planning on writing another 669 pages on this iconic skeleton, it’s easy to imagine it happening. As Owsley puts it, “Kennewick Man has more to say.”

Editor’s Note: Want More? Writer Douglas Preston explores Kennewick Man’s story in greater detail in the September 2014 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. To discover more about the field of forensic anthropology, visit the website for the past exhibit, Written in Bone.

08/11/2014

Unintended Journeys is a photographic exhibit in collaboration with Magnum Photos on view until August 13, 2014 on the second floor of the National Museum of Natural History. This is the second post in a series exploring the relationship between humans and the environment, and the consequences of human migration and displacement.

Imagine a tropical cyclone is hurtling towards your home. Its destructive potential is staggering. But you’ve seen hurricanes—your city has weathered them before. Do you board up, hunker down and hold out hope? Or do you run — abandon your home, and seek refuge? For the people of the Gulf Coast, this was not a game of scenario. When the storm hit, it hit hard, and thousands were thrust into a whirlwind of difficult decisions.

On August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came rolling across the Gulf Coast at 125 mph, surging six miles inland, breaching the levees of New Orleans, and ultimately flooding 80 percent of the city up to depths of 6 meters. The deadliest storm ever to hit the United States, Katrina left 1,800 known casualties in its wake, along with an additional one million displaced. Hurricanes are no stranger to the Gulf Coast. A city largely situated below sea level, New Orleans has for decades demonstrated its exceptional ability to thrive under extreme conditions. These environmental pressures have, after all, been integrated into its very design. In collaboration with the US Army Corps of Engineers, the city systematically removed wetlands, drained swamps, and secured a series of costly levees. But these manufactured improvements devastated the landscape of its natural floodplain and buffer system, leaving the coast vulnerable to the very nature it had attempted to harness. The warning signs were all there, and yet no one seemed to anticipate the extent of the storm’s destruction. The formidable power of nature seemed almost inconceivable.

For months following the storm, catastrophic images dominated media coverage. The world watched as trapped residents desperately awaited rescue from rooftops, swarms of people gathered along highways, and frustrations mounted in the face of aid that never came. Images of the direct aftermath of the storm can be found in the portfolios of Magnum photographers Paolo Pellegrin, Larry Towell and Thomas Dworzak. Like most natural disasters, there was certainly nothing “natural” about the far reaching effects of Katrina. In addition to the overwhelming nature of the crisis itself, lack of preparation, chaotic rescue coordination, and media framing all intersected to expose a society still characterized by deep-seated systemic racial and socioeconomic disparity—disparity that had rendered certain groups disproportionately more vulnerable to the disaster than others. These disturbing revelations prompted many to ask difficult questions about the underlying causes of both the lack of preparation and delay in government response. Reactions to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath ranged from tremendous empathy, outrage, and confusion, to a sober critique of governmental failure and even larger reflections on American society and culture.

Katrina is a tragedy forever etched into the minds of its survivors. Eight years later, we still struggle to make sense of the rubble. Post hurricane photos taken by Eli Reed and Peter van Agtmael show that even with mass mobilizations to rebuild, the landscape and its people are forever changed. Return to normalcy is slow, sometimes excruciatingly so. Many may never return. The resiliency of New Orleans nevertheless shines through its historically rich and unique culture. Many have found empowerment through musical tradition, using it as a medium through which to preserve connection and conduct social change. Others have adopted alternative ways to share their stories, to promote a greater understanding of exigent structural and environmental issues yet to be addressed. With this comes an appreciation that preservation and reflection are a crucial means of fostering positive change. Katrina will certainly not be the last hurricane to ravage the Gulf Coast. But it serves as a stark reminder of the web of important relationships among ourselves and the natural world.

For a personal perspective on the impact of Katrina please read Ann Juneau’s account, The Long, Long Road Home,which she has graciously shared with the museum and public. A selection of objects from Ann’s home are on view as part of the exhibition.

07/11/2014

That’s the main message of a new paper published in Science by the Director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, Rick Potts, and his colleagues Susan Antón, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, and Leslie Aiello, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

The traditional “savanna hypothesis” postulates that many of the adaptations that distinguish our genus, Homo – such as walking upright, making tools, a large brain and body size, and a long period of maturation – were associated with cooler, drier habitats and the spread of grasslands. But this new study fine-tunes the timing of these traits to reveal a much more piecemeal process rather than a package deal. The climate framework they present, based on Earth’s astronomical cycles, demonstrates that these characteristic emerged against a backdrop of fluctuating climate that included both wetter and drier times of varying intensity.

It’s also clear that human evolution did not proceed in a linear fashion, with one species evolving after another. Soon after our genus (Homo) first evolved, by about 2.4-2.3 million years ago, there were at least three different species of Homo walking the earth: Homohabilis, Homorudolfensis, and slightly later Homo erectus. In fact, these species overlapped in time with each other and even with Australopithecus and Paranthropus, two other genera of early humans. Some of their fossils have even been found at the same prehistoric sites. Anatomical traits and behaviors were mixed and matched, with some more human-like features found in some species, and others in different species, which according to the authors indicates that each species utilized a different strategy to survive. This diversity has since dwindled due to the extinction of all other human species aside from our own. We are the last biped standing, but currently stand at over 7 billion strong. Potts attributes our great evolutionary success to our adaptive versatility: the ability of the earliest members of our genus to innovate – to find new foods, make new tools, exploit new habitats, and eventually migrate out of Africa – in the face of ever-changing conditions.

This chart depicts hominin evolution from 3.0-1.5 million years ago and reflects the diversity of early human species and behaviors that were critical to how early Homo adapted to variable habitats, a trait that allows people today to occupy diverse habitats around the world. Image courtesy of Antón, Potts and Aiello (2014), Science 345(6192).

By Dr. Briana Pobiner, Human Origins Program, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

11/21/2012

Erin Haney, Research Associate, National Museum of African Art/ Lecturer, George Washington University

At NMNH, don’t miss Sammy Baloji’s exhibition The Beautiful Time, on view until January 7,
2013. The Beautiful Time splices together two visual tracks, and
sets off a powerful and haunting study in reverberation—cutting through space
and across time.

In this image, an archival photograph of a prisoner is placed at the center of the current industrial wasteland. The chain around the man's neck recalls the roping together of prisoners by colonial officers to prevent their escape. Untitled, Sammy Baloji, 2006, Digital C print.

Baloji’s photomontages illuminate monumental stories in an
old mining center in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Amid slices of
present-day landscape, spectral people interfere: migrant mine workers, Belgian
families, Congolese officials. Within the panorama of photographic past and
presences, Baloji summons the multiple relationships between workers and
colonists, and and the conditions of work in the colonial era. He literally
dredges up images, lost and found, in Katanga.

After seizing power in 1965, President Mobutu Sese Seko often visited industrial sites, attempting to promote what was described as good management and hard work. Such events were the subject of wide coverage by the state-controlled media. This montage is composed of individuals from several archival photograph including Mobutu, television crews, and soldiers. Though it seems to depict Mobutu visiting a mine, Baloji is not re-creating a specific historical event, but rather evoking the era. Sammy Baloji.

The Beautiful Time is
a set of projects to mark the gaping holes between moments in time. Photomontage
offers the vivid mixing—of events and people freely, perhaps in tune with our own
human senses memory and recall. President Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of what was
then known as Zaire, appears to take a tour of the ruins. Surveyors chart the lost future of the
mining works, and military officials allude to the ties between lucrative
enterprise and state security.

Baloji appropriated archival images, lifted from old
photographs and glass plates that once circulated in Katanga. Placed according
to creative demands and logics, the artist crafted an entirely new set of
heart-grabbing fictional moments. While his camera pans across old warehouses
and smelters, registering the sun’s path, the VIPs are ghosts that we can see
as clear as day.

In the Belgian Congo, Europeans were expected to dress formally for all official occasions, especially if they were to be seen by local inhabitants. Their attire was a sign of belonging to the elite, but was also justified as a means of leading by example. The placement of individuals atop a slag heap in this image evokes the grand life the Europeans were able to enjoy as a result of the mining economy below. Sammy Baloji.

Baloji’s magic links a generation of criticism leveled at
the older generation, with sidelong observation of the institutions and
governments which have failed and jeopardized their citizens. Mining wealth
enriched Europeans and Congolese unequally. Working for the company that itself
was a prime generator of capital was, to be sure, an ambivalent situation,
well-paid and tightly controlled. So, in the face of that well-remembered
golden age and its aftermath, ‘Beautiful Time’ meditates on those ambivalent
absences.

The reverb effect, captured by Baloji and other young
activists and artists working in Africa, drives out those missing things. Using
lost archives and troves of photographs cinematically, they tackle how the past
and present collide. The stories matter, critically. Those old pictures belong
neither wholly to the Congo nor to Belgium, to individuals or a single
community. Lubumbashi-born Baloji plays them back into view, to electrifying,
magnifying playback effect.